"[T]he rebuilding of postwar Germany into one of the world's most affluent nations," Dersh writes, "is a moral disgrace. A minimal appropriate response...should have been a generation of poverty." Dershowitz even fondly recalls Henry Morganthau's proposal to partition and deindustrialize Germany and turn it into a pauper nation.
Leave aside for the moment the argument that the half of Germany that was partitioned and impoverished is the only place in Germany where anti-Semitism is openly voiced today. Instead, consider a German friend of my family, a small child during the Second World War who made his life's work educating German schoolchildren about the Holocaust. He remembers distinctly the first day he wasn't hungry; he was 11 years old. It is instructive to remember that if Alan Dershowitz had been calling the shots in 1945, my friend would probably have starved to death.
When West German President Richard von Weizsaecker was invited to speak at the 1986 Harvard Commencement, Dershowitz staged a one-man protest against the appearance. (The index entry reads "Dershowitz, Alan, protests Nazis honored at Harvard, 90-91.") Weizsaecker's crime? As an attorney, he defended his father, a high-ranking Nazi diplomat, in a war crimes trial. Representing an unpopular criminal defendant! Why of all the heinous, rotten, despicable acts!
But this is sweetness and light compared to Dershowitz's invective against Israel's critics. His own words are disturbing enough to merit being quoted at length:
"There is yet a third strain of the current virus of anti-Semitism, this one even more difficult to diagnose. Its danger lies in its subtlety, its pervasiveness, and its acceptability at all levels of our society...the singling out of Jewish institutions and especially Israel for special scrutiny..."
Granted, radical Third World types have an infuriating tendency to condemn Israel for abuses that pale before those committed in Arab states and most of the nations on Earth, for that matter. But that's no reason to tar those who believe that Israel should be held to a higher standard (it being completely dependent on the U.S. for its survival and all) with the brush of anti-Semitism.
Like the vast majority of Americans, I believe the U.S. should prop up Israel because it's our moral duty to stick up for threatened democracies. Israel's Jewishness is immaterial to us. To Dersh, it isn't, so he needs to spend an inordinate amount of mental energy convincing himself (and others) that there is no contradiction at all between supporting Israel the democracy and Israel the Jewish state.
Dersh wants to have his challah and eat it too: He wants Israel (and Jewry) to be respected for their moral tradition (as they should be), but he also wants to judge Israel's actions by the standards of the Third World, if need be, not by the standards of the Jewish tradition.
As long as Israel remains relatively observant of human rights and human decency, that poses only a small problem. But it is worth the price of the book to see the mental gymnastics that a brilliant civil libertarian will undertake to remain both a man of principle and a man of his roots.